Introduction

AppVisor is a service of ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals). You can submit your
PADs (Portable Application Descriptions)
describing all the programs you have written free or trialware to http://publisher.appvisor.com and they make
them available to all the PADSites who will display them in a pleasing way to the
public, and help people find suitable programs, rate them etc.

Advantages

Programmers have to submit their PADs
to only one place.

Programmers no longer have to deal with thousands of incompatible submission
schemes.

Individual PADSites do not have to deal with filtering out
PAD (Portable Application Description)
submissions of spam and malware. That is all centrally managed by
ASP
and done only once.

PADSites cannot blackmail you to provide back links.

Disadvantages

You are not allowed to post or distribute your Advisor-prepared
PADs.

The PADSites must pay ASP
to download each PAD. However, ASP
filters out most of the junk, so the fee is probably worth it.

Submitting to AppVisor is quite onerous. You must login and use their inept,
slow, PAD
editor instead of the earlier PADGEN.exe utility.

If the AppVisor server is down, nobody in the entire world can work on their
PADs
or fetch PADs
for PADsites.

You cannot make bulk changes to your stable of PADs.

You cannot use custom programs to compose or edit your
PADs.

ASP
now has the power of life and death over your ability to distribute your programs.
In my particular case Americans have often threatened to kill me because they did
not like my politics or sexuality. I don’t appreciate such people having the
absolute power to censor my other works in retaliation.

The AppVisor editor advise programmers to lie to increase their ratings and to
code their PADs, not according to the spec, but to cater to PADSite
sloppy interpretations of the spec. That is not the sort of thing you expect from a
standards issuing body.

It puts all PADsites on rigorously equal footing . They all have the same set
of programs to choose from. They can no longer compete on their ability to attract
submissions.

It is easier that ever for a PADSite to be parked or repurposed without
ASP
noticing. At least before the Submission page would usually get a 404 as an
indication of trouble.

All PAD
extensions have been discontinued, including PADMap and PADRing.

You, as programmer, have no control over which sites your
PAD
is submitted to.

Tips

On the appvisor site, click start
⇒ pad editor
⇒ import
to import a PAD version 3 or 4 you have edited manually yourself. Reputedly it will override any existing PAD, though I have not yet tried it.
This is usually much faster than creating and maintaining a PAD 4 with the online editor.

When you update a PAD with the AppVisor editor, you must both SAVE and PUBLISH
to have the changes take effect.

You cannot rename a program, though the AppVisor editor will let you. You must create a new PAD from scratch.
Even if you could get AppVisor sorted out, many PADsites do not let you rename programs.

List of AppVisor PADsites

The following is a list of sites who use the PADs
submitted (or more accurately composed at) http://publisher.appvisor.com/. You will notice
that only a small fraction of PADsites have converted over to PAD4 and AppVisor
submission. Further, the total number of PADsites is dropping precipitously. It was a
mistake to implement the new system without a lot of input from both developers and
PADSite managers.